Cattails and Dough Bait

[Duane R. Morgan]

DOUGH BAITS

Making dough baits for sunnie fishing probably puts me in the kiddie forum, but dough bait or boilies for carp fishing seems to be big time in places like Great Britain. A formula I like uses cotton to hold the mix together, but recently came across this new additive, which I can’t wait to try. CATTAILS…

A local bait dealer at Lake Texoma demonstrated his catfish dough bait for me that uses cattails to hold the bait together. He swore it worked better than cotton and I believe he’s right. He placed a ball of his dough bait on a hook and swirled it around like David and his sling shot, and it stuck on the hook like Gorilla Glue.

Now I have used cotton with Velveeta cheese when fishing for stocked trout when the kids were younger, and in sunfish dough baits along with gluten flour to keep the bait on the hook as long as possible, but it never really stayed on for very long. Small sunfish have a knack of plucking dough bait off a hook pretty quickly. Mostly I use dough bait around docks, piers or jetties as a teaser to get the sunnies cranked up, but I definitely want to give this cattail additive on a hook a try to see if it works.

Have any of you tried cattails in dough baits, or have other suggestions on how to best hold dough baits on a hook. Grandkids love dough bait/jig fishing using our cork loop method.

 

MORGAN’S DOUGH BAIT RECIPE

Dry Ingredients:

• Gluten Flour
• Raspberry Jello
• Salt
• Garlic Powder
• Onion Powder
• Cat Tails to replace cotton balls

Liquid Ingredients:

• Canned Sweet Corn
• Red, Orange or Pink Food Coloring
• Fresh or Frozen Uncooked Shrimp
• Canadian Worms or Red Wigglers (compost bin)
• Vanilla Extract
• Oil of Anise
• Berkley Gulp Scent (optional)

 

Procedure

1. Liquefy liquid ingredients in Ninja…(don’t let the mamma catch ya!).
2. Add liquid and dry ingredients, and mix into a firm dough.
3. Make a ball of the mix and place in Saran wrap then a Ziploc bag.
4. Flatten the ball and store in the refrigeration until ready to use.
5. Store excess dry ingredients in plastic peanut butter jar.

 

No specific recipe for the ingredients…bad chemist! 

[carl hendrix]

HAHAHAHA  I;VE EXPERIMENTED WITH SCENT BAITS FOR YEARS;;;;  THIS IS A NEW ONE ON ME !   ALTHO IVE NEVER USED CATTAILS FOR ANYTHING;;;; I HAVE USED;; COTTENSEED;; TO BAIT SOME CRAPPIE HOLES;; WORKS GREAT !!

[jim cosgrove]

made some doughbait with my young nephew with what was on hand.strawberry crush frosted flakes and flour to bind it together.kid caught his first catfish and carp and several bullheads and green sunfish in an hour.cattails are great to bind this stuff together.carp like the sweet stuff catfish like meat.raw cheap hamburger has caught 100s of catfish for me and my family.you need a doughbait treble and must keep the hamburger iced up.you need a bunch as it falls off as soon as you move it.

[John Sheehan]

I've never made dough baits .So you don't cook the ingredients?

[Duane R. Morgan]

My posted dough bait recipe originally started out as a catfish dough bait, and got modified for sunfish. The recipe was made from whichever ingredients were handy at the time of processing. There was never anything definitive on which ingredients or measurements, but always gluten flour to bind things together. Never really understood the need for anise, onion or garlic powder, but scents for sunfish cousins, large and small mouth bass, often include these ingredients, so I just left them in the formula.

Ingredients were never “cooked”. We sometimes referred to the process of fermenting grain sorghum for catfish bait as cooking. I left this process to a fishing partner who never wanted to divulge his entire recipe, and frankly I didn’t care. You could not even touch this stuff with your bare hands without having stink-finger for a week.

Carl’s comments got me to thinking about different ways to use sunfish dough baits. For instance using cattails, cottonseed meal, and various scents in making a chum bait to attract minnows and pan fish around docks, piers, or jetties made sense. After a lengthy net search I came across several you-tube videos using cattails in their “punch baits”. Guess using cattails is not as obscure an idea as I thought. Not a great deal of information in the videos, but I did learn something about mixing the cattails…they made the punch bait really stiff rather quickly. The more fluffed up cattails pieces added, the more difficult it became to incorporate them. These punch baits got so tacky they stuck to fingers like silicone sealer, and even one big-ole-boy got plumb worn out mixing his!!!

As usual one thing lead to another, and I came across the use of “water crystals” in a recipe for making a smelly jelly, another additive which could be used in a sunfish dough bait. The smelly jelly appeared to act as a slow release mechanism as well as for scenting. I looked for some different scents to add to this smelly jelly recipe and thought either worm, shrimp or crayfish scents would work well. Figured I could then eliminate the step of adding night crawlers or bait shrimp to the wife’s Ninja blender when she wasn’t looking. Some cheap blender might do the job just as well in mixing the liquid ingredients, and that could be a real lifesaver.

[Duane R. Morgan]

[carl hendrix]

HAVE YO UEVER CONSIDEWRED;; USING;; A HAND MIXER  INSTEAD OF A NINJA  ???  IVE ALSO;; BENT A COAT HANGER WIRE;; INTO A LARGE ; ( L ) TYPE SHAPE;; USED MY DRILL;; TO MIX UP DIFFERENT TYPES OF SCENTS;;;;;  MAKES FOR-- LIVING WITH MY WIFE;; MUCH MORE;; HARMOUNUS !!!  ALTHO MY WIFE IS;;; ONLY;; 5 FOOT 4 INCH;; 128 POUNDS; AT THE MOST;; BEING A -- REDHEAD;; SHE CAN BE;; 12 FOOT TALL-- AND ;; BULLET PROOF !!  TRUST ME;; I KEEP HER;;  MOST OF THE TIME;; BEING;; 12 FOOT TALL !  HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

[Duane R. Morgan]

Gottcha Carl on the hand mixer and the red head momma business as well.  I use a blender to mix various peelings and egg shells for my compost worms, so this same blender could work well for the basic ingredients. I have given thought to incorporating the cattails and have decided they should be a last step measure. Just incorporate the dough into the cattails when ready to use rather than the other way around. You might even make the mix stiffer by leaving the cattail mixed dough balls sit in the sun for a few minutes, like you do cut bait shrimp, to harden it even more for the hook.